BEIJING — In candid, face-to-face talks, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping traded arguments Wednesday over China’s contentious new air-defense zone, with no consensus about how to defuse an issue that is raising anxieties across Asia and beyond.

The U.S. will now wait to see whether China, despite international pressure, will enforce the zone — a strip of airspace more than 600 miles long above disputed islands in the East China Sea.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called China’s announcement of the zone “destabilizing” and said that it had come “so unilaterally and so immediately without any consultation.”

“That’s not a wise course of action to take for any country,” Hagel said at a Pentagon news conference.

In Beijing, the outcome Wednesday was not what Biden might have hoped for.

A day earlier, he had stood shoulder to shoulder in Tokyo with the leader of China’s rival Japan, pledging to raise Washington’s deep concerns with Xi directly in hopes of tamping down tensions in the region.

U.S. officials worry that China’s demand that pilots entering the airspace file flight plans with Beijing could lead to an accident or a confrontation spiraling dangerously out of control.

Neither Biden nor Xi mentioned the dispute as they appeared briefly before reporters after their first round of talks. But in private, the issue came up at length at the beginning and again near the end of the long-planned meeting, said senior Obama administration officials. In all, Biden and Xi met for more than five hours.

The typically upbeat Biden appeared subdued as he reflected on the complexity of the relationship between the two world powers seeking closer ties despite wide ideological gulfs they have as of yet been unable to bridge.

“This new model of major-country cooperation ultimately has to be based on trust and a positive notion about the motive of one another,” said Biden, flanked by top advisers in a resplendent meeting room steps away from Tiananmen Square.

The calibrated public comments played down the deep strains permeating the relationship between the world’s two largest economies.

As Biden arrived in Beijing, an editorial in the state-run China Daily charged Washington with “turning a blind eye to Tokyo’s provocations,” warning that Biden would hit a dead end should he come “simply to repeat his government’s previous erroneous and one-sided remarks.”

Behind closed doors, Xi made his own case for why China’s action to establish the air zone is appropriate, said the U.S. administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Xi listened earnestly as Biden presented his own arguments, the officials said.

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